From Colbert to Trump’s WSJ lawsuit, Axios’ Sara Fischer on media turmoil

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

Bob Safian: Hey everyone. Bob Safian here. Today we present a special episode focused on one of the most consequential weeks ever in the media business, from Stephen Colbert’s cancellation by CBS, to Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, to the clawing back of a billion dollars from PBS and NPR. My guest is Axios reporter Sara Fischer, who cuts through the conspiracy theories to unpack what’s really going on. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I am Bob Safian, and I’m here with Sara Fischer, media correspondent at Axios and analyst for CNN. Sara, thanks for being here.

Sara Fischer: Thank you for having me.

SAFIAN: So I got to say that the headlines in media have been mind-boggling over the past week. I mean, we have CBS canceling Stephen Colbert’s show, Trump suing The Wall Street Journal, Congress clawing back funding for PBS and NPR. It makes your head spin, plus Substack raising money at a billion dollar valuation and Superman killing it at the box office and Emmy nominations and Netflix earnings. The news cycle is so intense. For someone who’s covering all this, how are you doing? How is it juggling all of this?

FISCHER: Yeah. It’s not too bad. This is my job. This is what I’m paid to do. This would be like saying to a surgeon, “Oh my gosh, you had to do three heart transplants, and then you had to do a total blood transfusion, and then you had to see patients for checkups.” They’d tell you, “That’s what I signed up for.” So that’s how I feel about it too, and it’s actually better to be very busy and to have a lively news cycle than to be twiddling your thumbs and looking for something to cover.

Copy LinkUnderstanding Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal

SAFIAN: Alright. Well, so I’d say let’s start with the most important or consequential, but it’s hard for me to even pick what that is. So let’s start with the most recent bombshell, which is President Trump suing The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over an article that said that back in 2003, Trump sent a birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, body is the term I think used to describe it, with an illustration of a naked woman. We haven’t seen this note. The Wall Street Journal didn’t publish the actual thing, but it comes as MAGA world is screaming for the release of anything related to Epstein. Trump’s suit also targets Rupert Murdoch personally, the media mogul behind The Wall Street Journal and News Corp. This suit, is there any merit to it? Does it matter if there’s merit?

FISCHER: The legal experts say that it’s a flimsy case, but to your point, you don’t have to have a strong case to do damage. Anytime you sue a media company, you cost them lots of time, energy, resources, reputational drama. So the lawsuits that Donald Trump has waged against media companies have been pretty effective. The one thing that’s interesting about this particular case is that I don’t think Donald Trump would sue if he was very concerned about what would come up in discovery if this went to trial.

So that changes the dynamic of this lawsuit. It makes it different from his lawsuits with CBS and ABC. He settled both of those for 16 and $15 million respectively. He has something to lose here if something comes up in discovery, and he still chose to sue anyway. So even though legal experts think he has a weak case, that piques my interest because I don’t think Donald Trump is wading into lawsuits where more could come up around his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, if that’s something he’s been so aggressively trying to bury, according to Democrats and now some folks in the MAGA community.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, there are these conspiracy theories on all sides in some ways when it comes to Epstein, but what you’re saying is because in some ways, because Trump is a public figure. The legal burden he has to surpass to be able to prove damages is high even if the report from The Journal isn’t the actual thing?

FISCHER: Yeah. And you have to also prove not just the damages, but that they publish this with malintent, with actual malice is the legal term, and that’s also a difficult thing to prove in court. So I think that Donald Trump is facing a tough legal argument, but I also think he wouldn’t have waged a lawsuit if he felt like he really had something to hide. So that’s what makes this one particularly complicated.

I will say in terms of The Wall Street Journal, this is a newspaper that is very, very serious about its journalism, and that’s not just on the newsroom side. It’s lately published a lot of editorials that have been critical of the Trump administration, including the Trump administration’s targeting of the media industry. So I take it seriously, if Emma Tucker, their editor-in-chief and The Journal decided to publish this story and move it forward, they would not have done that if they didn’t think that they had ample reason to. So this is going to be a very, very, very interesting case to watch, but again, very different precedents that are being set. Very different approach than what we’ve seen in the past.

Remember Donald Trump, this is the first media company that he’s actually sued as president. He’s in a counter-lawsuit currently with the Associated Press around blocking its reporters. And he sued those other two media companies before he was elected. He’s done plenty of media and defamation lawsuits and has been involved in those lawsuits in the past. But this is the first one as a sitting president.

SAFIAN: I mean, and of course beyond the legal implications, Trump has been very aggressive about charging that certain outlets are fake news. It’s not just lawsuits. And this puts The Wall Street Journal firmly in that camp, I guess.

FISCHER: Donald Trump does not care who you are or who owns you. If it’s politically convenient for him to call you fake news, he will do so. And if it’s politically convenient for him to rely on your authority to prove a point, he will do so. The best example being while he was engaged in a lawsuit about CBS, on Truth Social, he was promoting positive polls conducted by CBS about him, and if there’s a story by the AP that suits his position on something, he will promote it too. Same thing here. If The Wall Street Journal were to report something that was bad about Democrats, he’d blast that out on Truth Social. Donald Trump is an equal opportunist when it comes to how he targets the media. So it doesn’t really matter who you are. If it benefits him to bash you or benefits him to support you, he will do that.

Copy LinkNavigating declining trust and legal risks in modern journalism

SAFIAN: And I’m just curious, for someone like you who’s covering this stuff, does this impact at all how you think about or approach your own work? Or do you worry that people aren’t going to trust your reporting or the President’s going to go after you, you’re just like, “I’m just going to do my thing because I don’t know what or how he’s going to react to different things?”

FISCHER: Well, I go into this knowing that trust in institutions, including the media has declined dramatically over the past few years. So it’s not a FISCHER trust problem, it is a media trust problem, and that forces me to be more diligent, more transparent about showing my work. It’s not just according to a source, it’s according to a source that works at this company that’s in this level of a position that had knowledge of this situation because they were in the room. You have to explain yourself more in an era where there is less trust.

And then in terms of being concerned about lawsuits, I was always, and I have always been concerned about lawsuits because anytime you get something wrong, you are susceptible to a lawsuit. I do think that this administration is more apt to sue. So a lot of news companies are taking extra precautions and extra measures, hiring more lawyers, making sure their journalists are going through more legal trainings. But in terms of does it force me to think about my journalism in a different way? No. I do the same thing for the most part. I just try to be more transparent about my work and a little bit more careful about running things through legal.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I had a mentor early on in my journalism career who said to me, “The legal standard for what you can be sued for is here.” The truth is a higher standard, and as long as what you’re running and you’re printing and you’re talking about is true, you’re protected. And that is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get to the truth.

FISCHER: Yes. And as long as it’s going back to the actual malice, I think a big thing here is, yes, you always need to be getting to the truth or the closest variation to the truth that you can get to in the time and resources that you have, but you also need to be putting in a good faith effort to do right by everybody that you’re citing and that you’re quoting, and that you’re writing about, going to them for comment. One thing I had a lot of empathy for in the White House is that Karoline Leavitt, their press secretary, said some days, and by the way, it’s not just her. It’s every White House press secretary. It’s every press secretary and communications official. She says, “Some days people come to me after they publish the story for comment or they come to me five minutes before.”

As journalists, sometimes we have a lot of restrictions that we’re working through, but I heard that and that made me really think, “How can I do a better job to be doing a more thoughtful job, to be getting to that closest approximation of the truth? How can I go to people and give them more time to explain themselves, maybe explain their side of the story?” I think more consciously about that now.

Copy LinkBehind the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late night show

SAFIAN: So you mentioned earlier Trump’s claims against 60 Minutes and CBS, which were settled with CBS parent Paramount agreeing to pay out $16 million. That leads us to the second piece of big news in the last week, which is CBS announcing that they’re canceling the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s. You and I are recording this Monday afternoon. Who knows what Colbert will do on the show tonight? CBS claimed financial reasons for the cancellation, but there are a lot of other theories zooming around. Can you break this down for our audience? What does your reporting show about what’s really going on?

FISCHER: If I had to guess, I think that this show was losing money because most late night shows lose money, and CBS is facing a ton of financial pressure, as are most traditional television networks in the streaming era. And eventually they would’ve had to either reduce the number of nights, reduce the number of staff, claw the show back, or shutter the show altogether. But what you have right now is this perfect storm where you have the opportunity to shutter the show, but make it look as though you did it to appease the Trump administration politically. And I think that’s what happened here. Now, I think it would’ve been-

SAFIAN: So they want it to look that way? They want it to look that way to the administration?

FISCHER: I don’t know, but I think they would be wise to frame it that way. Because you know that you’re not going to get your deal approved by the FCC unless you not only settle with Donald Trump, but make an effort to show them that you’re doing what’s best for public service programming. The new CEO of the company that’s buying CBS, so the CEO of the company that’s buying CBS, David Ellison, the CEO of Skydance Media met with the chair of the FCC on July 15th. So two days before they canceled the Colbert Show, Paramount did. And that was basically what their lawyers said in a filing. They said, “Look, we tried to explain to the FCC that we want to get the approval of the transfer of broadcast licenses approved very, very quickly, and that in return, we can promise we’ll do good public service.”

So I think that this is a way that they can prove to them that they’re serious about that effort and do it in a way that’s not so aggressive in what they have to pull because they likely were already mulling changes to their late shows anyway. If you think about the past two years, Trevor Noah left, James Gordon left, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has been pulled. NBC has reportedly pondered moving Seth Meyers, although his contract’s been renewed through 2028. I mean, the era of late night is tough. So I think that CBS is probably thinking about doing something anyway, and it was a politically convenient time to announce.

Now, the challenge with that is it comes at a massive reputational hit for the network. This is what the CBS 60 Minutes settlement did. It hurt the network’s reputation, and that’s what this is doing for the network as well. But I think that the new owners and the current owners, they don’t care because what other choice do they have? If this deal doesn’t go through, no other deal would get approved in the Trump administration, and by the time Donald Trump is out of office, you are looking at this company losing significant market value to the point where they might even have to gut CBS News anyway. So I can see why they thought that this was the lesser of all evils, unfortunately.

SAFIAN: And the choice, I mean, they’ve said that Colbert Show is still going to run until May of next year. Why not just shut it down now if it’s losing money?

FISCHER: Because they probably already sold a lot of ads in the upfront. They have commitments. They have commercial commitments. They have people who are under year-long contracts. They have vendors that they’re already paying out. So there’s a lot of reasons you don’t just shut it immediately. But I think this also speaks to the fact that it’s a message that’s being sent. The fact that they announced this being shuttered two days after that meeting, even though they don’t plan to cancel the show for a while, it’s because they want to make sure that the announcement comes so that they can get a deal approved. I mean, I don’t think anyone would deny that that’s what the optics are here, even if CBS says this is a financial decision. They have enough plausible deniability to be able to say it’s a financial decision, even though there’s, in my opinion, probably more to it.

SAFIAN: Yeah. I mean, I had someone speculating to me that part of the financial decision was that Colbert has been outspoken enough about the President that advertisers maybe are becoming more cautious about advertising their brands next to Colbert’s content as if Trump might hold that against them.

FISCHER: It’s a little bit of a flimsier argument because then you would say that about all news and all comedy, it’s all the same problem, this brand safety issue. And yes, advertisers are pulling back, but they’re pulling across the board. I don’t think Colbert is uniquely being targeted by that problem.

Copy LinkHow advertiser behavior and brand safety are shifting the media landscape

SAFIAN: But the pullback that you’re mentioning, there is a pullback in ad spending for Q2 across the board. Is some of that because advertisers are more uneasy about being associated with anything that might be viewed as problematic by the Trump administration, or is it broader?

FISCHER: Yeah. It’s way broader. I mean, the tariffs have really killed the ad market because anytime there’s uncertainty, you can’t market your products. If you’re an auto company and you don’t know what your production is going to look like, how many cars are going to be on your lots? You can’t spend marketing around the cars on the lot. So the ad slowdown is much broader than what’s happening in the news space. But I do think over the past few years, the conversation around brand safety, around news content, around comedy, it’s shifted. There are advertisers that used to love to advertise around news because it had a high ROI, return on investment. You have some of the most engaged, affluent people who consume news content, so the ads are very effective.

But yes, advertisers have yanked a lot of their ads from news content because of the controversy. And it’s not just mainstream outlets. It’s also, you’ve seen mainstream outlets that are considered more established. You’ve seen this with Fox News, which is also established, but it’s more conservative. There’ve been a lot of boycotts around its content because advertisers have felt that it’s not brand safe. So it’s not just like the CBSs and the NBCs of the world. Everyone’s dealing with this problem. Ironically, Fox, when they had those big boycotts a few years ago around Tucker Carlson’s show, I was like, “Man, this is tough for Fox. They’re going to have to really lean into their pay TV subscription revenues.” Now, because Donald Trump consumes the content, their ad revenues are sky high. So it’s funny how things bounce around.

SAFIAN: Sara’s assessment of the weakening business of late night shows like Colbert’s is undeniable. YouTube clips alone aren’t enough to support a network TV show, yet her “why now” explanation is downright disturbing. A cynical signal to the Trump administration to help gain FTC approval for a deal. So what else is lurking beneath the surface in the latest media convulsions from defunding PBS and NPR to this year’s Emmy nominations? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Axios reporter, Sara Fischer, explained what’s at stake in Donald Trump’s lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, and why CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late night show. Now, we talk about cutting funding for PBS and NPR, why media platforms like Substack and Reddit are booming and what this year’s Emmy nominations say about HBO, Netflix, and Peacock. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkThe real impact of defunding PBS and NPR on local communities

Let’s talk about public media, the vote in Congress to claw back over a billion dollars in funds. We’ve had the CEOs of both NPR and PBS on the show, and they said the pain would mostly hit local stations. You’ve reported on the stakes. Is that right? That the big shows and big stations won’t be as hampered? Ken Burns documentaries are still going to be funded and made, but it’s local news and programming that’s going to be thinned out?

FISCHER: Yeah. So if you take a look at NPR National, only about 1% of its funding comes from federal government funding, and PBS is about 15% because the vast majority of budget, that $1.1 billion over 2 years that’s being cut, it goes to these hyper local stations, and a lot of it is in rural areas where these stations have very little access to reader donations because the household incomes in those areas are much lower. So those are the stations that are going to be impacted. Some of those rural stations, by the way, they rely on government funding for up to 50% of their budget. So it’s expected that we’re going to see a lot of those rural stations close.

And what’s sad about this is the whole point of this reputationally, was to hit NPR and PBS. NPR and PBS nationally are not the ones that are going to be impacted. It’s your mom and pop small public media station that is airing your board meetings and your municipal board meetings and your school lunch hearings and all that kind of stuff, those are the ones that are going to be impacted, and a lot of those rural stations are in Republican districts. So it’s going to be funny the way that this has played out because it’s not going to have the intended impact that these cuts were broadcast to have.

SAFIAN: But politically, I guess it works with the base?

FISCHER: No, it really doesn’t. That’s the thing. Polling suggests that people value their public media and that people don’t want this funding cut. I think what is a very real thing though, is people do not like the national programming all the time. There’s one complaint that you hear from syndicators of NPR programming, which is like, “Why are we so focused on LGBTQ storylines? It doesn’t impact me in rural Iowa as much.” So I do think there’s a lot of people who think that the programming needs to be changed, but the vast majority of people don’t necessarily want these public media outlets to be completely gutted. I do think it helps Donald Trump with this broader political narrative of, I’m going after the progressive mainstream media, but people don’t necessarily view their local hometown radio station as that. They just view it as, you know, KQER or whatever an acronym is, they don’t view it as NPR.

Copy LinkWhy trust is moving from institutions to individuals and online groups

SAFIAN: It’s interesting that the smaller stations people may have a more emotional connection to and may trust them more. I guess it brings me back to this idea about the ways that both trust and the media business are fracturing and becoming more atomized. I’m thinking of the reporting you did on Substack raising $100 million investment, now of a unicorn value to over a billion dollars. Does Substack’s rise indicate that there’s a kind of content that consumers are hungry for that’s changing, that’s either more narrow from a particular source, or is Substack more about the changing business model of media overall?

FISCHER: The money is actually moving much faster than the consumer behavior, and that’s unusual. Typically, the consumer behavior moves much faster than the investment. In this case, if you take a look very consistently, Pew, Gallup, those polls will show you the number one most trusted media is always local, especially local broadcasts, is huge. And by the way, the number one media in terms of weekly penetration in the United States that has more reach into any other Americans is terrestrial radio. So that is where right now, the bulk of trust and reach is.

But what I think you’re seeing happening is investors are eyeing a trend, which is that more people are moving trust from institutions to individuals that they have a relationship with or that they can relate to. So investors want to put their money behind those individuals. Increasingly, Substack has become the platform for a ton of those individuals, but that’s very much at the national level. I mean, Substack has a ton of writers, podcasters, cartoonists, even video people on its platform, but it’s not been the lucrative place for local journalists to go. It’s a great place for former cable stars to go. So unfortunately, I don’t think this investment in Substack can be addressing this fallout of local news, and that’s where all the trust is.

Where I do think you’re going to see more and more people turn to trust in local is on tech platforms where they can join groups and develop community. That’s where a lot of misinformation is shared, but that’s where it’s going. So if you think about Facebook groups or next door, these are apps where people are going, they’re developing relationships with people in their community. There’s a lot of trust there. So the news that those people share is something that people are starting to trust more than even local broadcasts. Unfortunately, you know this, everyday people share misinformation all the time. So it creates a situation where I’m not very hopeful for local, sadly.

SAFIAN: Yeah, no, and Reddit is like the example of, your local community is virtual. The confines of it are virtual, not geographic, but you’re still in a bit of a bubble, and there’s all kinds of things good and bad that roll through that platform.

FISCHER: And Reddit is crushing it right now for a lot of reasons. But I do think one of them is that people trust conversations with actual people, reviews by actual people, pictures from actual people more than they do the AI chatbot right now, or more than they do the big media institution. And that is a trend that I don’t think is going to be stopping anytime soon.

SAFIAN: Many nominations were announced recently, Apple’s Severance leading the charge. Do the nominations tell us anything about which streamers or studios are rising, or is everyone really still playing second fiddle to Netflix and that’s where the action is?

FISCHER: Yeah, no. Actually, if you were to take a look at the one studio that has the most number of nominations across shows, it’s HBO and HBO Max, so that’s a traditional entertainment company. So I think that HBO still has staying power. You typically see some of the premium cable nets like FX, get a bunch of nominations. It all comes down to how much you’re playing to awards versus how much you’re playing to subscriber retention. They go hand in hand, but they’re not always the same. I think Netflix has always said that they want to replace pay TV. Well, a lot of pay TV is garbage and it is not award-worthy, but there’s an audience for it. You’re not winning Emmys for 90-day bake off or whatever it is, but that is content that helps lure someone from the cable subscription over to streaming. That was Netflix’s model for a while.

So it doesn’t surprise me if they’re not always the most Emmy nominated, whereas HBO, their model has always been premium subscriptions, whether that’s a premium cable subscription or a premium streaming subscription. So for them, premium is the business model. That’s why you’re always going to see them have a lot of Emmy nominations, and that’s why, by the way, I don’t rank the success of certain streamers based solely on nominations and awards because not every streamer is here for the awards. In fact, I look at some of the investments that Paramount Plus and Peacock are making in live sports. Sure, they’re going to get some daytime sports Emmys for those, but you’re not going to see them showing up at the award show in September. The value proposition for that streamer is totally different.

Copy LinkThe future of politicized speeches at major award shows

SAFIAN: I was thinking that the Emmys Award night show isn’t until September, but ironically, it’s on CBS. Does that mean we should expect more speeches than usual about freedom of speech and a free press or fewer?

FISCHER: I don’t know. In the pandemic era, it really killed ratings to have it be so politicized and then coming out of the pandemic, it became so much less political, and that was helpful. I was at the Grammys earlier this year, and even though it’s less political, I mean, there was still so much. Chappell Roan coming out there and talking about healthcare. A lot of award recipients were talking about immigration policies in light of Donald Trump. Increasingly, we’re finding that viewers don’t like that. They just want regular old award shows. So it wouldn’t surprise me if CBS, and that, by the way, is also going to air on Paramount Plus, if they try to keep these speeches short and tight and keep this pretty apolitical, because ultimately that’s what keeps ratings pretty high.

SAFIAN: Well, Sara, this has been great. Thank you so much for doing it, and I hope we’ll have you back on.

FISCHER: Yes, same here. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.

SAFIAN: As Sara explains, consumers are getting tired of hearing about social and political issues alongside their entertainment. Similarly, advertisers are increasingly gun-shy about the environment their brands are in, and I get it. It makes logical sense given business realities and the polarized environment that we’re in. But can I say, it makes me a little sad. I prefer the notion that those who have a cultural platform use it to make the world a better place, not just to sell more stuff. Regardless, I’ll be intrigued to see how Stephen Colbert uses his platform in the days, weeks, and months ahead. What happens when a comedic star has nothing to lose? We’re about to find out. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.